In 2012, a man in Los Angeles filmed a police chase from his balcony. He held his phone upright, the way you hold a phone. The video went viral. And every comment was about the same thing.
“Turn your phone sideways.”
For a decade, vertical video was wrong. It was amateur. It signalled that you didn’t know what you were doing. Every cinematographer, every YouTuber, every video guide on the internet said the same thing: landscape or nothing.
Then TikTok happened.
By 2023, vertical video wasn’t just acceptable — it was mandatory. Instagram Reels: 9:16. TikTok: 9:16. YouTube Shorts: 9:16. Pinterest: 9:16. The entire attention economy flipped ninety degrees because phones are held upright and platforms optimised for thumb-scrolling.
This created a new problem: reformatting. Millions of hours of existing video — recorded in 16:9 landscape — suddenly needed to be 9:16 vertical. Corporate content libraries, marketing archives, YouTube back catalogues, tutorial recordings. All landscape. All wrong for the platforms that now matter most.
The professional solution is re-editing in Premiere or Final Cut. Import, create a vertical sequence, reframe every shot, re-export. For a production team, that’s Tuesday. For a solo creator, a small business owner, or a social media manager with forty videos to reformat before Friday, it’s a wall.
What most people need isn’t a full re-edit. They need a crop. Take the landscape frame, extract the centre (or a specific region), output at 9:16. Maybe scale. Maybe pad. But fundamentally: change the shape, keep the content, get a file back.
The reason this is still harder than it should be is the same reason most file operations are harder than they should be. The simple task is buried inside a complex tool. You don’t need a non-linear editing suite to change an aspect ratio. You need a box that takes a video and gives you a different-shaped video.
The aspect ratio tax — the time and effort spent reformatting content for platforms that didn’t exist when the content was made — is a real cost. It compounds across every piece of content a creator or business produces. The tools to reduce it exist. They just need to be as simple as the problem.